Faster Booting in Consumer Electronics

In consumer electronics market, the need for fast boot has become paramount; think of a TV set taking 20 seconds to boot up and another TV set taking 3 seconds on shelves. Suspend-to-RAM might be an appealing solution; however, there are a lot of customers that plug out from an outlet to save energy, making suspend-to-RAM useless. Besides, with the emergent of smart electronics, especially with smart phones and smart TVs, the initial state of a device has become nondeterministic, making snapshot booting technique based on suspend-to-disk extremely difficult. Thus, vendors of such devices depend on the performance of a normal booting sequence: a.k.a. "cold boot".

Recently, the importance of the addressed area has been dramatically highlighted by the increasing boot time in mobile platforms. We have been developing general-purpose OS based consumer electronics with the requirement of showing up things within a few seconds with a "cold boot", where even tens of milli-seconds appear significant to engineers. In such optimization practices, the worst enemy is lying in free page scanning from the physical memory. In this talk, we introduce why we cannot reach the requirement of the lightweight kernel without the study of the memory allocator in embedded devices.